An excerpt from my Interstellar Script Analysis which will be available 11/10/14:
2.) Plot Stability
Finding NASA
(Movie) A “gravity ghost” is in Murph’s room, and gives the coordinates via a binary dirt message on the floor.
(Script) A probe crashes to Earth, leading Cooper to an island off the coast of California, where the remnants of NASA are mounting this final mission.
I preferred the script’s storyline here to the movie’s.
The problem with the movie is you start to paint yourself into a corner with the whole “spiritual” thing.
When Murph keeps talking about the ghost, I groaned in my seat thinking, “Shit it’s going to be her mom, or Coop’s going to die and it’ll be him.” Sort of like a “Swing away, Merrill,” moment.
I was part right, part wrong, but the probe idea still worked a lot better, and didn’t force a plot “stretch” early on.
(Note – I personally wasn’t satisfied with Cooper finding the “timeline” of the bookcase. Not when I left the theater after, and ESPECIALLY not after I read the way it played out in the script.)
The probe works.
It’s a logical reason for why the machines (including the early captured Indian/Russian drone) are seeking a certain point AND gets Cooper to NASA without “ghosts.”
Want the full review? Follow this link to the script review.
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Personally, I didn’t like Interstellar much either. But there weren’t any ghosts in the movie, there is no spiritualism at all. I can’t really be bothered to explain (it’s (too) complicated) but you can read up on it yourself.
Don’t get me wrong though, that whole bookshelf thing had me groaning as well.
Haha, I regroaned at the thought of the bookshelf.